Giving up their whole world for the future.
Last time on X-Men: The Animated
Series, we got some more time travel shenanigans. In 2055, a Mutant by the
name of Fitzroy made a deal with the Master Mold to travel to the past to kill
Charles Xavier in order to make the Sentinel extermination of Mutants easier.
Thankfully, future Forge, Bishop and Shard were tipped off and the siblings
leapt back through time. Unfortunately, they were too slow and the timeline
started to reset. The 90s of this altered timeline has a Mutant vs. Human war with
Magneto leading Mutantkind against the human’s robots and Avengers. Storm and
Wolverine are both present, as a married couple and devout followers of the
Leader. Shard and Bishop arrive and tell the two of them what happened because
they need backup for this mission. Both are skeptical but come around after
seeing Shard’s holograms of the original timeline. Storm is willing to help,
and Wolverine agrees to begrudgingly because he knows that in the other
timeline he and Storm aren’t together, and she’s his whole world. They travel
back to 1959 and track down Charles, a young med student with dreams of being a
doctor and hiding his Mutant status for the foreseeable. They show him the holograms
and try to convince him, but their pitch meeting is ruined when a racist coffee
shop owner saw Logan and Ororo holding hands. A fight broke out and Charles ran
off in the confusion. They try to find him again but run instead to Master Mold’s
greatest warrior, Nimrod, who came back with Fitzroy to make sure the job is
done. The four Mutants destroy Nimrod but fail to stop Fitzroy from killing Charles
with a bomb. How on earth will they fix this? Enough recap. Let’s get to it,
shall we?
We begin with the explosion that
destroys Charles’ dorm room and then the whole building. Storm voices the obvious
that Fitzroy planted a bomb, and that Charles never had a chance. Bishop starts
shouting at Wolverine for ruining the mission, blaming his angry outburst at
the racist coffee shop owner for why they lost track of Charles. The cops
arrive to try to arrest them for what happened at the coffee shop. Wolverine
and Bishop are ready to scrab but Ororo throws up a tornado and blows them
away. Shard says they need to return to the future and hope that Forge and the portal
are still there so they can try to course correct the future again. Logan
refuses, saying that fighting for Magento wasn’t so bad and that he doesn’t
even know Charles, but Ororo doesn’t buy it, saying that she knows him too well
to ever believe he’d willingly let these people down. They travel to the
future.
They step through the portal and find
this futuristic, but the proportions seem… off. It’s not until they see the
fully cyborg except for his face Forge for them to realize this is the Sentinels
Rule the World future. Forge hits the alarm button to summon the Sentinels.
Logan stabs the alarm destroying it. Bishop tries to remind Forge of the old
timeline that he’s completely unaware of, which, ya know, doesn’t work. He
doesn’t know what the resistance is or who these people are. Shard seems to hope
he has some memory as she points out that they just used his time portal, but
Forge insists it’s still experimental. Obviously Master Mold wants it built in
order to make sure the time travel loop remains closed. If he doesn’t have a
means of sending someone back in time to kill Charles, then Charles lives and
disrupts the current timeline. Ororo tries to reset the portal, Forge begging
her not to. Wolverine snidely asks what can scare Forge more than him. Then the
upgraded Sentinels arrive. These machines are much more powerful than the old
models, Ororo barely destroys one with all her power. Forge tries to beg for
his life, but they aren’t listening. Shard tries to convince him to help them,
but the shooting is really distracting. The remaining Sentinel tries to destroy
them, but Bishops shoots it to pieces. Forge agrees to help them, and Bishop
tells them the armbands have the coordinates. The first Sentinel gets up and
tries to attack. Logan destroys it but he gets thrown to the ground and knocked
out. Ororo is obviously terrified that he was hurt after that explosion, she
forgot he heals I guess, but he gets up and they kiss. Forge starts resetting
the machine, but it was damaged in the scuffle so he has to try to make repairs
as quickly as he can.
We cut to Fitzroy and his sidekick
Batham trying to get his reward from the Master Mold. He has Nimrod play the
video from its chest. Master Mold clearly doesn’t want to honor the deal its other
version made and tries to find a loophole by asking if they took care of the
other time travelers. It reasons that because those four were time travelers,
they also exist outside the time stream and thus remember history before it was
altered. Fitzroy scoffs at the idea that four people could change anything, just
before the alter goes off that Forge’s station has unregistered Mutants at it.
Master Mold orders that they kill the Mutants and stop them from fixing time or
not to bother coming back. Master Mold tells Nimrod to stay back and gives it
special orders. Bantam starts whining, holding them back long enough to hear
Master Mold ordering Nimrod to kill them after the time machine is destroyed.
The Mutants get attacked by the enforcer
Sentinels. They destroy several while Forge frantically tries to fix the
machine. Unfortunately, then Nimrod shows up. It blasts Bishop aside, who just
redirects it because that’s his whole power. Fitzroy and Batham arrive, shooting
at the sentinels instead of the Mutants. He throws a force field grenade
that traps Nimrod for a few moments. He gives Bishiop a device saying that it
will explain everything. He gets blasted by Nimrod as it frees itself. Shard
gets separated from the group, but she demands they leave her behind, rationalizing
that if they fix the timeline she’ll be fine too. Bishop really doesn’t want to
leave his sister, but he and Logan jump through the portal together. Shard tries
to get to Forge to try to talk to this lookalike of her friend, but they’re
both implied to have been killed by Nimrod.
The others return to the past, with
Ororo and Logan giving Bishop their condolences. But the mullet head says he’s
not giving up just yet. They’ve got extra time this time, and he pops Fitzroy’s
disk into his arm band to see what he left, turns out it’s a will.
We cut to the coffee shop fight and
Charles running off with the other bystanders. They realize he’s gone and go
after him. Bishop, Logan and Ororo grab Charles, Logan threatening him to make
him compliant, which causes him to pass out. Ororo scolds him for doing it
again. They arrive at Charles’ lab and explain what happened to him. He’s skeptical
but Ororo tells him to just read their minds. He does so but says that Logan
doesn’t want their mission to succeed. He and Bishop have a standoff, Bishop
threatening to blow his head off, but Logan saying he feels what he feels but
that doesn’t mean he’s a traitor. Someone comes to the door and Bishop points
his shotgun at it. It’s just Cindy, Charles’ classmate. Or so they think, Logan
takes several whiffs and realizes it’s Nimrod. They fight, the three Mutants
overwhelming Nimrod and shattering it into pieces. It recovers, though, and
starts attacking again. Bishop gets the bright idea to shoot it’s time band,
which basically forces the machine back to the future. They breathe a sigh of
relief, but Fitzroy arrives and hurls the bomb at them and traps them in a
forcefield bubble to make sure it works. Ororo begs him to let them go, telling
Fitzroy that he’ll be killed. Bishop plays Fitzroy’s will for Fitzroy, and they
prove that point by pointing to their other selves arriving to try to save Charles.
They convince Fitzroy, who throws the bomb out the window. The other set of
Mutants disappear. Bishop lets Fitzroy go but tells Fitzroy that he will kill
him if he tries this again. Fitzroy drains Charles to open another portal, and
they leave. Bishop marvels at how one man could affect so many lives while
looking at Charles. Ororo and Logan wonder why they still exist, Bishop telling
them that their armbands keep them outside of time’s flow, once they take them
off they’ll reset. He says he’s sorry and teleports away. Logan and Ororo hug,
saying that they love each other one last time before turning off their bands
and kissing.
Time resets and they’re outside during
their picnic in the last episode. Ororo and Logan are still hugging and yet don’t
find that at all odd. Logan makes the crack again about why they can’t just get
ants like normal people. He then tells Ororo that it was a ‘good tussle’ she
gave him and that they should do it again sometime. Ororo laughs and says if
she didn’t know better, she’d think Logan was flirting with her. He basically
says he wasn’t not flirting with her, and they have a laugh. Charles rolls up
and just sort of smirks knowingly at them before remembering the Dystopian
versions of them.
This was a good, bittersweet ending
to this two-parter. I like that the episode went out of its way to acknowledge
that, yes, Logan and Ororo are giving up a lot in order to give everyone else a
better world. Does their universe suck? Absolutely, but they have each other
and it is asking a lot to take that from them. Bringing up that Logan kind of
hopes they fail right before the finale does drive home that doing the right
thing here is tearing him up inside. Looking in on the Sentinel controlled
future minus the resistance was neat. Part of me wondered why the Master Mold would
spare Forge, but then I remembered that Forge’s power is all about inventing
new technology, so using him as cyborg slave labor is just planning on the Master
Mold’s part. We don’t get a lot about him, but he’s 95% machine where he’s normally
10%, doesn’t take a genius to figure out his life has been rough. I’m
not at all shocked that the Master Mold ultimately betrayed Fitzroy. Takes a real
stupid person to think one can be the exception to a death campaign. It’s more
that the Master Mold was so blasé about it. Like, you know the dude just
left, maybe don’t speak in your natural register Master Mold. Could have been a
text… wait… based on 1995’s version of the future, you have no idea what
texting is. Retracted. While it might have been nice to let us see Bishop
reuniting with Shard and their version of Forge, I think ending on Logan and
Ororo and a “maybe they’ll be a thing again” message was the right call. While
I enjoy their relationship as unlikely friends, the fact that there are
multiple stories of them being a thing in 2025 makes it clear they’ve got a
chemistry that people like. Obviously I know that the show never brings this up
again, but with X-Men: 97 being a thing, they could always use more
storylines. Oh, speaking of, remember this episode for that series. No reason.
Next time, more Murderbot.
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Bluesky: @basicssuperhero.bsky.social
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